


Breathe Out

by keren



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Gen, Infinity Stone Soul World (Marvel), Not A Fix-It, Post-Endgame
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-15
Updated: 2019-05-15
Packaged: 2020-03-05 20:30:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,357
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18836224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keren/pseuds/keren
Summary: ENDGAME SPOILERSENDGAME SPOILERSENDGAME SPOILERSIron Man meets up with Black Widow for a mission recap.





	Breathe Out

**Author's Note:**

> Just in case I haven't made it clear thus far, THIS ENTIRE FIC IS ONE BIG AVENGERS: ENDGAME SPOILER.

Breathe out. Pepper’s here. 

Open your eyes. She’s gone.

It’s all gone. The destroyed compound, Peter, Pepper and them, the suit. The stones. All gone. He’s in his favourite tank and jeans. His hand still stings a bit, but just as he thinks about it the sting is gone, too. He’s standing in a corridor, bare white chalk walls and concrete floors. In front of him there is a black door with a little brass plaque that reads 71. He looks around and shrugs, here goes nothing, and knocks. Can’t hurt to be polite.

Natasha opens the door.

“Is this Heaven?” he asks, a bit blindsided but willing to make the best of it. He’s feeling strangely equanimous. 

She cracks a smile. “Get in here, Stark.” As usual, she won’t give him time to finish his quip.

“This is unexpected,” he says casually as he steps through the threshold, looking around. They’re in hotel room, threadbare, with black-out blinds on the window and a TV playing static. Natasha sits on the bed.

“Tell me about it.” She brushes away a strand of hair that has fallen out of her braid and into her eyes; she too is intact, as if Vormir never happened as Barton described it. “Any ideas?” she gestures at the room.

“What is this place?” he asks instead of answering, which is what he’s always done when he didn’t have an answer at the ready.

The bedside lamp is on, but the light bulb is feeble. The only other light comes from the TV, which casts the whole room in an appropriately ghostly grey. 

“Budapest, 2003. This is where I joined SHIELD.” The look on her face isn’t quite what he would call nostalgic.

He raises his eyebrows at her. “Ah. So your Heaven, then.”

She laughs. “Wouldn’t exactly call it Heaven. Purgatory, maybe.”

They both pause for a beat as they consider the concept. Red ledgers and all.

“What do you think we’re doing here? Why both of us?” he asks, since she’s had more time to think.

Her face becomes serious, like she’s recalling something. “Did you die, Stark?”

“You mean you don’t know – what happened?”

Slowly, staring at him, she shakes her head.

“Damn.” He drops down on the bed, which emits a creak under his sudden weight, and sprawls down. The mattress is thin foam, cheap. He crosses his hands on top of his stomach. “We won, Nat. We got everyone back and killed Thanos.” 

“Thanos was already dead.” She had that little crease between her eyebrows that has always been the only sign of her confusion.

“He figured out time travel somehow – I – actually don’t know how,” he realises suddenly. “It was a younger Thanos that we were fighting. There was this huge battle…”

He’s only just stepped off the field, yet it seems strangely distant. It was barely five minutes ago that he lay dying, and it’s all fading away already. He remembers it all. It just feels – unimportant.

Natasha is staring at him. Perceptive as ever, she can guess his uncertainty in the lines of his face, and the cause of it in the clench of his fingers in his shirt.

“I think it’s because we’re dead,” she explains. “It’s hard to hold on to anything.”

Tony looks at her blankly.

“How did you die? Tony, why is it you showing up here and not anyone else?” He can hear the implied roll-call. Barton, or Banner, or Cap, would have been more appropriate to deliver the news.

“I figure everyone else lived. Thanos was about to get his hand on the stones again – destroy everyone this time – so I snapped. Got rid of him and the army he rode in on. And then I burned.” He closes his eyes, trying to call up the sensation. It’s somehow infuriating that his wounds have been so neatly healed in this place. Like nothing happened at all. Upon thinking this, he starts to feel the sting of phantom pain up and down his arm, a headache starting where his skull had felt split in two by the burn. He frowns in thought.

There’s a small smile on Nat’s face. “You gave your life to save the universe.”

The quip is at the ready (no big deal, just a normal Thursday, something like that) but instead he looks at her and tells her, “so did you.” He answers her smile with one of his own, warm and awkward for its lack of sarcasm. She looks down almost coyly, that strand of hair falling back into her face to hide her smile turning into a grin. Her gaze falls on his hand and she grabs it, holds on. 

“We’re Big Damn Heroes, huh.”

The happiness is communicating. He knows she feels as he does, oddly glad to have given her life for the rest of the world to live on. Tony didn’t particularly want to die, but he has nothing to grieve. Morgan, Peter, Pepper, the Avengers as he once knew them – they’re all fine. Except this one here. He beams at her. 

“Big Damn Heroes,” he agrees. “I hope they build a statue or something.”

“They better make me look badass,” she mutters. She looks like a little girl in her braid, when her eyes sparkle like she’s trying not to giggle. 

“Like they could do anything but.”

“Are you gonna miss them?” 

He squints up at the ceiling, sits up, looks at her. “Can you miss someone if you’re dead?” 

“That’s what I was asking.”

“I think that’s one for the theologians. Or the philosophers.” He tries to think on her question, but his gaze is drawn off, distantly focusing on the static on the TV. “You ever see one of those Magic Eye illusions?” he asks her distractedly. 

“Those pictures that look 3D when you look at them a certain way?”

He points at the screen. She turns, and her eyelids flutter. 

“I don’t see it”, she says. Then, “oh.”

“So that’s what it is. We’re in the soul stone.”

“I think it’s sentient,” she hedges. She was always frighteningly quick on the uptake, sometimes half a step behind him, sometimes half a step ahead. “You’re  
sort of a herald. It held on to me for a little while so I could hear that we’d won.”

“Nice of it.”

“Yeah. But now it’s – “

TIME TO GO, blinks the static on the screen. In 3D. Talk about gaudy.

“How do you figure we should go, then?” Tony asks. “Man, this place needs an instruction manual.”

“Like you’ve read an instruction manual in your life, Stark. “ Her lips purse in thought. “Where should we go may be the more pressing question.”

“Aren’t they the same question, in this case?”

“Now who’s being philosophical?”

“I can’t help it. Death, you know. It makes you think.” It makes her laugh, certainly, which is the main idea.

Neither of them protest the fact that they must leave. They can hardly stay here forever, after all. 

“What’s beyond that window?” Tony points at the blinds.

“Budapest. At least it was the last time around.”

“As good a start as any,” for making an exit. Black Widow does love scaling down buildings.

“And you?” They can’t possibly leave together.

“I don’t really fancy attempting to fit through the bathroom vent. I guess that leaves the door.”

“How strangely civilised of you,” she points out with a sideways smile.

“Well,” he concludes, standing up. “Onwards, then.”

She’s already at the window. She was always so much faster than he was. But she turns around, still, and looks at him with eyes full of certainty.

“Will you be okay?” She’s terribly beautiful.

“Well,” he says, stuffing his hands in his pockets, “I’ll be dead, but then, so will you.”

“Right.” She winks suddenly, grins. “See you, Stark.”

And she pushes the blind up and jumps out without looking down. Beyond the window, as far as Tony can see, there is only a fog of nothingness. Not white, nor black. Not something that can be described. 

He looks around the room for a second, shrugs, and takes the door.

**Author's Note:**

> Finally got around to seeing Endgame. I was so excited. Aaaaaand my two favourite characters are dead. 
> 
> So it took brutal murder for me to actually finish a fic for once lol
> 
> Thanks for reading!


End file.
